Word: gas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What's an oil company's return on investment for fighting malaria? A lot higher than you'd think. Outside the Middle East, many of the world's reserves of petroleum and natural gas are located in Central and Western Africa, where malaria takes a particularly horrific toll. By the most conservative estimates, the mosquito-borne disease kills 1 million people in Africa each year--most of them children--and it hurts businesses by sapping the energy of hundreds of millions of adults...
...when Marathon Oil decided in 2002 to expand its natural-gas operations to Bioko (pop. 250,000), just off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, company managers focused their attention on the region's crippling malaria rate. Marathon concluded that protecting only its employees and contractors wouldn't be enough. Because mosquitoes will bite anybody and Marathon expects the island facility to be productive for 40 years or more, the company adopted a more ambitious goal: it is working with its business partner Noble Energy, nonprofit organizations and the Equatoguinean government to stop transmission of the disease on the island within...
...results also reflect the value of good data collection and verification--a core competency in the oil business that translates well in the public-health arena. Satellite imagery like that Marathon used to site its natural-gas processing complex helped determine how the sprayers should organize their visits. Teams of Equatoguineans collect and test mosquitoes from traps in various homes to see where adjustments need to be made. Information about family health, mosquito numbers and geopositional locations is recorded on the spot with handheld wireless devices and transmitted to a centralized location...
Right now, though, most Lebanese have more pressing concerns. The army's journey south revealed a landscape of ruin. The tobacco-farm country around Tibnine, a hill town about 10 miles from the Israeli border, is like a slide show of destruction--scorched earth, leveled homes, torched gas stations--shot in a gray scale of cement dust and summer haze. While refugees have flooded back into other areas of Lebanon, only the brave or desperate have returned to these parts, which are still strewed with unexploded bombs, many of them from antipersonnel cluster munitions. "There are thousands of these...
...privilege of the few," Angelides said in his speech at the gymnasium of the Boys and Girls Club of Hollywood, flanked by union members and various Democratic officials. "That dream is in jeopardy because hardworking, middle-class families are working longer for less [because of] stagnant salaries, soaring gas prices, higher tuition for their kids and higher healthcare costs. We need a governor who will restore the promise of middle-class opportunity... and put hardworking families first...